Hydrogen-Harvesting Catalysts From the Sun

By Ucilia Wang in Greentech Media, November 23 2009

Sun Catalytix has raised $3 million in venture capital to its coffer as the company sets out to make cheap hydrogen energy storage.

The one-year-old startup in Cambridge, Mass., seeks to use solar electricity to split water molecules to harvest hydrogen, which would sit in a tank before being fed to a fuel cell to generate electricity at night or otherwise employed as a transportation fuel. Electricity storage would be the company's primary focus, said Bob Metcalfe, a partner at Polaris and a member of the startup's board of directors.

Conventional means of extracting hydrogen requires clean water, and water purification equipment can be costly, Metcalfe said. The startup's catalyst, on the other hand, would use a cheap, inorganic compound that doesn't require clean water.